The kitchen is a great place to make environmentally friendly changes to your lifestyle. Whether it be from the food you buy to the way your food is cooked and stored, there are many ways to cook more sustainably, use less energy and reduce your carbon footprint.
Food blogger Kapptain Cook is hugely passionate about promoting sustainability in cooking and offers 10 simple tips which could help reduce the amount of food in waste.
- Never waster veggie scraps – plant them, use them for a stock, cook them or use them for compost
- Reduce your meat intake – Try veggie recipes, or make meat a treat. This could improve your health and reduce emissions from agriculture
- Use less water and electricity when cooking – only use the water you need ad switch things off when they aren’t in use
- Utilise the whole of the chicken – what you can’t eat use for stock
- Grow your own vegetables
- Think about replacing you gas cooker and hob, with an electric induction version
- Plan your meals and shopping list so you’re only buying what you need to
- Use reusable containers to reduce plastic waste
- Proper preservation and storage of food – check used by dates and freeze items where you can, so you avoid throwing food away
When cooking, small actions can add up to actual energy savings. Energy can be conserved whilst cooking by choosing the correct size pots and pans and keeping them covered with lids to retain heat. Using your oven more efficiently can also save energy, you can stop or reduce preheating to conserve energy and choose cast iron, ceramic, or glass cookware to retain heat and speed up cooking time.
Storing food can also be done more resourcefully, when boxing up leftovers, leave them to cool down or reach room temperature first. Putting hot leftovers straight in the fridge heats up the appliance causing it to work harder and consume more energy to get back down to the required cool temperature.
By thinking a little more about our daily cooking routines, we can each do our bit to not only reduce food waste but also save ourselves money.
You can find some tasty recipes, cooking sustainably by visiting the WWF healthy and sustainable webpage
